Riot Games

Riot Esports Network (REN) was the ambition to bring the fragmented experience of Riot's esports properties into a unified platform and draw viewers in from Twitch and YouTube. I joined through Riot's acquisition of Kanga in 2021 and led design on the live watch experience from brief through shipped components. In early 2024, Riot shut down REN before public launch. The work below is what we got right, and what I'd do differently.

Why it was hard

Twitch and YouTube solve distribution. They served Riot for years, but never let Riot own its audience. And they don't solve context: a first-time viewer has no idea what the gold differential means, a hardcore fan wants real-time data without leaving the broadcast.

Two viewers in constant tension. A casual fan watches Worlds once a year and needs just enough context to follow along. A hardcore viewer wants data density and zero friction. Every layout decision had to serve both without splitting the product into two apps, while giving each one a reason to leave Twitch or YouTube for a platform Riot owned.

The first attempt put every interactive element—chat, stats, schedule, drops—into a single right-side pane next to the broadcast. Testers rejected it almost immediately: they didn't want to manage their viewing experience. Twitch and YouTube had trained a posture, and we were violating it.

We landed on familiarity-plus. Chat sits on the right by default, mirroring Twitch. The left panel—opt-in, collapsed by default—houses what only Riot could offer: real-time game state, per-player stats, a play-by-play event feed, and a rewards loop where watching earned in-game League items. A loop only Riot could close, and the strongest argument for building platform-native viewing habits in the first place.

Right-side chat (familiar) plus an opt-in left panel for platform-native context

The architecture's discipline was negative: anything that could plausibly live inside the broadcast didn't. Anything that competed with it for attention was the wrong answer. Picture-in-picture extended the same logic—keep the match persistent while browsing the schedule, because leaving the watch view always cost engagement in tests.

Picture-in-picture preserves the broadcast while browsing schedule

Drops—watching earned in-game items, the loop only Riot could close

Familiarity is a feature, not a constraint. The strongest design decision on the project was the one that copied Twitch on purpose. Treating muscle memory as a starting point—rather than something to overcome—is a move I'd repeat.

Comprehensiveness is not the same as essentialness. Panel density crept in late because we kept finding things only Riot could surface. A sharper MVP would have shipped fewer of them and let the rewards loop carry the platform-native argument alone.

Fandom is intuition, not evidence. I came in as a Riot esports fan, which helped pattern-match early but required discipline to not let familiarity substitute for testing. The single-pane prototype only failed because we tested it.